


If You Want It

by citruses



Category: The Aeneid - Virgil
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Stop!" The word hits like a blow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Want It

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Winter Holiday Commentfic fest on LJ, for honeyed_oak, who asked me to change the ending of the Aeneid.

It all happens in a rush -- everyone is dying, Nisus and Euryalus and Camilla and  _Pallas_ , the truce seems broken before it is even secured, his arrow wound burning with pain and seeping dark blood, the battle raging on and on. Time seems to blur, fold into itself, and focus sharply on this moment he's imagined, this moment, when he raises his sword over Turnus, heart thundering, blood ringing in his ears --  
  
"Stop!"  
  
The word hits like a blow and he realises he wasn't breathing, gulps down some air. All around them the fighting has ceased, and now that the spell of the death-moment is broken Turnus scrambles for safety across the dirt of the plain, makes for the speaker. It's Lavinia, her skirts gathered up, her head high.  
  
"My love," Turnus says, sounding at once grateful and bewildered. Lavinia smiles slightly.  
  
"No need for fighting any longer," says a second voice, and the speaker is another woman walking among the men, a woman whose skin seems to glitter like the surface of a stream, whose hair waves over her shoulders like a mountain spring's outpour. Everyone is sheathing their swords as she passes, and Aeneas dazedly puts his up, too. He's still buzzing all over his body, fizzing down all his limbs. Juturna says, "We women have settled this. There will be no more deaths to settle this dispute -- and no marriages to settle it, either."  
  
Aeneas thinks of the fatal marriage with Dido, of Troy and Creusa; he thinks suddenly of Andromache and her changed life, of Astyanax. No more marriages. He weighs the thought as if testing the heft of a sword.  
  
"Lavinia shall marry neither of you," Juturna continues, looking hard at Aeneas with her river-blue eyes, then turning to her brother. "She is not some token of good faith, the spit that seals a merchant's pledge-handshake. And she is not the spoils of war. I, for one, value her at more than the price of a gilded tripod or jewelled drinking-cup."  
  
If Lavinia feels the weight of two armies' eyes on her, considering her value anew, she does not show it. "Better still to say that I have no price, for I cannot be bought or bartered. And I have never wished to marry. My father knew this, but he only now acknowledges my will."  
  
Her tone and bearing invite no argument, but Turnus approaches her, touches her arm with his grimy, bloody hand. "But my darling --"  
  
"Your darling no longer, Turnus," she says, detaching herself easily, and Aeneas is still catching his breath, is (he thinks) coming back to himself after what feels a long time, but even he can decode the smile she exchanges with Juturna. The gratitude and pride there are tangible, the resolve admirable.  
  
"But we are no fools, we women," Juturna proclaims now, looking at Aeneas again. "We know that something more is needed to assuage the anger, to make right the wrongs, to restore the peace." And as she steps aside she seems to produce something from the drapes of her clothing, as though she pulls it through a waterfall.   
  
No, not something -- some _body_.   
  
Pallas.  
  
"Persephone owed me a debt," she says to the men's cries of amazement when Pallas stands before them again, tall and strong as ever. She's smiling secretively, Aeneas vaguely registers, but that doesn't matter -- he cannot care any longer, honestly, nothing matters as much as getting hold of Pallas and making sure he is real, really alive, safe and healthy and whole. Aeneas's helmet hits the dirt. Shocked tears spring into his eyes as he buries his face in Pallas's shoulder, breathes against the boy's warm skin, holding on tightly.  
  
"Will this do?" Lavinia says after some minutes, when Aeneas has looked and touched his fill for the moment. "Is this sufficient to end the war? The return of a loved one thought lost forever?"  
  
And it cannot be insufficient. It must satisfy him, satisfy them all. If it comes as a shock, if the men grumble and, later, get into the odd drunken fight with the Latins, if it takes all Juturna's skill and power to pacify Turnus, then those are the consequences of trying to pass a woman from man to man like a wine-cup.   
  
Aeneas closes the gates of war alongside his new adoptive father, Latinus; he builds a great, many-roomed house, fit for the royal lines of Troy and Latium; he takes counsel daily from Lavinia on how to create a harmonious kingdom. Iulus grows and grows, and Aeneas heals his weary heart, and throughout it all Pallas smiles at his side like a second chance.


End file.
